Coming Into Their Own

‘Far From the Tree,’ by Andrew Solomon

How does it feel to be the mother of a teenage dwarf who’s desperate to start dating? What if you love the daughter you conceived when you were raped but can’t bear to be touched by her? And, as the father of a happy, yet profoundly deaf son who’s forgotten how it feels to hear, how do you deal with your memories of the times you played music together?

“Parenting is no sport for perfectionists,” Andrew Solomon rather gloriously understates toward the end of “Far From the Tree,” a generous, humane and — in complex and unexpected ways — compassionate book about what it means to be a parent. A lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell and the author of “The Noonday Demon,” a National Book Award-winning memoir about his journey through depression, Solomon spent 10 years interviewing more than 300 families with “exceptional” children. That is, children with “horizontal identities,” a term he uses to encompass all the “recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences or values and preferences that a child does not share with his progenitors.”

He developed what seem to be genuine relationships (entailing multiple visits, unsparing communication and significant follow-up over a number of years) with families of individuals affected by a spectrum of cognitive, physical or psychological differences: “They are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people conceived in rape or who commit crimes; they are transgender.” His interviews yielded nearly 40,000 transcript pages and his “anti-Tolstoyan” conclusion that “the unhappy families who reject their variant children have much in common, while the happy ones who strive to accept them are happy in a multitude of ways.”

Bookending this immense core of material are intimate accounts of Solomon’s own experiences: first, as the son of parents who lovingly helped him overcome his dyslexia, but struggled (as he did) with the idea that he was gay, his own “horizontal identity”; and then finally, and very movingly, as an awkward and awed new father himself.

This is a passionate and affecting work that will shake up your preconceptions and leave you in a better place. It’s a book everyone should read and, although everyone won’t (at a hefty 700 pages of text, with more than 100 pages of notes, it’s no pocket guide), there’s no one who wouldn’t be a more imaginative and understanding parent — or human being — for having done so.

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Credit
Gina Triplett

As a psycho-sociological study, it’s important and unrivaled; no one has ever collated this amount of evidence before. And even though the book might have benefited from occasional tightening, it still makes for breathtaking reading — a vivid and gripping account of who we are right now, and what exactly happens when we try to make more of ourselves.

“There is no such thing as reproduction,” Solomon points out on the first page, only acts of “production.” And despite the fact that we never know quite what — or whom — we’ll produce, it’s one of the least bitter truths of human existence that, regardless of what pain and anguish they put us through, we never ever regret our children. “It is not suffering that is precious,” he notes when recalling the depths of his depression, “but the concentric pearlescence with which we contain it.”

More than anything, “Far From the Tree” is a book about precisely that containment. Throughout, Solomon proves a calm and likable guide — open, curious, nonjudgmental, not too politically correct and also possessed of a sense of humor and honesty, which, you imagine, endeared him to his subjects. If he has expectations and prejudices — “My assumption about deafness was that it was a deficit and nothing more” — he is only too willing to have them demolished. After all, as he explains here with bracing frankness, he too knows about the humiliations involved in the search for (in his case, sexual) identity. He knows what it is to feel like a freak.

But it’s the other voices — the frequently shocking missives from the front line of human existence — that elevate this book from clinical documentary into something more eerie and emotionally resonant. The mother who realizes that her teenage son has sexually abused his young cousin; the dwarf who says forlornly, “We never leaned over in a movie and gently let a hand fall onto a breast . . . our arms aren’t long enough”; another dwarf who explains that, because he looks at people below the waist all day, “my idea of intimacy is the special occasion of looking someone in the face”; the despairing father who lets slip, when taking a birthday cake to his severely autistic 10-year-old in a residential home, “I don’t know who we’re doing this for”; the Rwandan mother of a child conceived in rape, who begs Solomon, “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?”

There is mystery here, as well as desperation. The autistic child who has spoken only four times in her life (each instance with words “appropriate to the situation”) makes her mother worry that “her soul is trapped.” Solomon is quick to point out: “To have a child totally incapable of language is distressing but straightforward, but to have a child who has spoken four times is to labor in terrifying murkiness.”

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Andrew Solomon, in light shirt, with members of his own family.Credit
M. Sharkey

But there can be wry laughter and tenderness in the murkiness. The young schizophrenic adored by his nephews and nieces who regard him as “his own particular strong essence.” The baffled mother of a child prodigy confesses her confusion to Solomon. “He just understands all things,” she says of her son, who became curious about the theory of relativity at the age of 3 and entered college at 9. “Someday, I want to work with parents of disabled children, because I know their bewilderment is like mine.”

Infinitely touching too are the stories of the marriages that survive — or crumble — under the weight of so much care­taking. “What we have left, as us,” a mother of two severely autistic children reveals, “is much less than when we got married.” Or, “I was a lot more frivolous before I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of mental illness,” a mother of a schizophrenic says with a sigh.

Solomon is able to appreciate the singular gifts of many “horizontal identities” — the “extreme sweetness of many Down syndrome children,” say, or the richness and pride of deaf culture. It’s only schizophrenia that he describes as pure “unrewarding trauma.” The suffering of schizophrenics and their families, he writes, “seemed unending, and singularly fruitless.”

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This is the book’s central conundrum: most of the families he describes are deeply grateful for the very experiences they would have sacrificed everything to avoid. We can’t help loving our children for who they are, not who they might have been. So, a mother whose second son was born as profoundly disabled as her first admits that if she had known the condition might have been repeated she “would not have risked it.” But she immediately contradicts herself by saying if she had the chance to “wipe out that experience,” she certainly wouldn’t have. Solomon declares, “Difference unites us.” But how much difference is too much? It’s a question that neither he nor this work ever manages to answer. But you sense that somewhere in that very uncertainty lies a startlingly accurate definition of parental love. Of the Rwandan rape victim who begged him to help her love her daughter more, Solomon observes, “She did not know how much love was in that question itself.”

The book’s final chapter tells of Solomon’s own journey through marriage to his partner, John, and on into parenthood. It contains a spark of real surprise, and it’s probably testament to the warmth and kindness with which he’s explored the stories of so many others that you find yourself catching your breath, suddenly apprehensive for him, as his life appears poised to come undone. To reveal more would spoil something, but suffice it to say that you end this journey through difference and diversity with an even stronger conviction that life is endlessly, heart-stoppingly, fragile and unknowable.

And yet. Spending time with the parents of a child so disabled he has to be lifted from his bed with a pulley, Solomon notes that to be in the room with them and their son “is to witness a shimmering humanity.” It’s a phrase that should be smoke-trailed across the sky, or at the very least stuck on the family fridge. It’s also a very accurate description of what he’s achieved in this wise and beautiful book.

FAR FROM THE TREE

Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

By Andrew Solomon

962 pp. Scribner. $37.50.

Julie Myerson is the author of eight novels and three works of nonfiction, including “The Lost Child.”

A version of this review appears in print on November 25, 2012, on Page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Coming Into Their Own. Today's Paper|Subscribe